Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.
Interpretation
The quote discusses the challenge of writer's block and the difference between intentional and unintentional creation in writing.
Martin Amis reflects on the struggle writers face when attempting to articulate their ideas. The distinction between choosing a subject to write about versus discovering one organically illustrates the frustration and creative difficulty inherent in the writing process, particularly when blocked. This highlights the pressures of creative expectations and the often unpredictable nature of artistic expression.
In practice
In a discussion about creative processes, this quote illustrates the struggle many writers face with writer's block.
Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark - spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving.
You know how it is when two souls meet in a burst of ecstatic volubility, with hearts tickling to hear and to tell, to know everything, to reveal everything, the shared reverence for the other's otherness, a feeling of solitude radiantly snapped by full *contact* - all that?
All my adult life I have been searching for the right adjective to describe my father's peculiarly aggressive comic style. I recently settled on 'defamatory.'
Love is an abstract noun, something nebulous. And yet love turns out to be the only part of us that is solid, as the world turns upside down and the screen goes black.
Jane was my wicked stepmother: she was generous, affectionate and resourceful; she salvaged my schooling and I owe her an unknowable debt for that. One flaw: sometimes, early on, she would tell me things designed to make me think less of my mother, and I would wave her away, saying, Jane, this just backfires and makes me think less of you.
It's always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.
The meaning of quality in photography's best pictures lies written in the language of vision. That language is learned by chance, not system.
One of the obsessions that the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist parties had was always controlling the message - all information that everybody gets has to be carefully controlled and monitored. Art was no exception.
Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul - let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and esthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!
In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.
That's the beauty of the animation process: It takes so long, you have so many chances to improve it.
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